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More suffering?? Not really. Now that we’ve got your attention, let’s actually talk about 7 ways to create LESS suffering – we love this blog post from the younger generations’ answer to Wayne Dyer – Meet Kute Blackson, if you haven’t already!

Part of walking the spiritual path is opening up to the idea that anything you’re experiencing can be transformed with just a small shift in thought. Blackson takes this approach with the very idea of ‘suffering.’ Causing one’s own suffering can be so obvious if it’s your spouse’s suffering, your brother’s suffering or your mother’s suffering. So in this article, Kute gives us an easy glimpse of how we create our own suffering.

If we do not turn inwards and train our mind, but instead expend all our energy on arranging and rearranging the external aspects of our existence, then our suffering will continue. -Buddhist teaching

By Kute Blackson

Most Gurus teach us how to avoid suffering. I am going to share with you the 7 steps of how to successfully create suffering in your life, so that you can be aware of them and make different choices. Suffering does indeed become a very dangerous addiction. It’s an unhealthy way to feel and ultimately it’s the basis for all of our feelings of being unfulfilled. You can get so used to suffering that it becomes comfortable and familiar. Suffering is the ego’s way of feeling important.

But whether you are a businessman or a Buddha, pain is inevitable. There is no way to avoid it. Just by virtue of being in a human body there will be some pain. Trying to avoid pain will only create more suffering, so embrace pain to release yourself from suffering. Suffering is absolutely optional. Suffering is a choice. Suffering comes from your story about what is happening in your life and less about what is actually happening. What is happening is simply what is happening. The suffering part comes from all your interpretations and meanings about the experience. Change your story and the way you are interpreting reality and you begin to change your reality. When you change your reality within yourself you shift your experience of your reality outside. Once you understand this, you only suffer if you chose to. What stories are you making up about yourself, your life, your partner, your current experience that is causing you suffering?

The 7 Keys To Create Suffering:

1- Resist everything: Resist what is. Resist reality. Fight against what is happening in your life with all your might. This is a guaranteed method to suffer.

Solution: Accept what is, so that you can then decide how to shift it.

2- Holding the belief: “The experience that is happening to me should not be happening to me. I should be having some other experience than the one I am having. This shouldn’t be happening to me”. You have probably heard yourself doing some version of this. It just keeps you stuck.

Solution: Embrace your current experience. Your current experience is the experience that you are meant to be having because you are having it right now. Trust, and focus on what the you can learn and how you can grow. The experience is here to help you evolve.

3- Focusing on all the things that you cannot control. This will only cause you to feel completely helpless and dis-empowered. It will leave you in a state of worry and anxiety. Some of us are professional “worriers”. No matter how much you worry it doesn’t actually change the situation. Once you are done worrying the situation will be the same. Worrying is a waste of time.

Solution: Focus on what you can control. Take actions that are in your power, step by step.

4- Refusing to change. Keep doing the same over and over and hoping for a different result. Well, as Einstein said is the definition of insanity. Are you so set in your ways that you are afraid of giving up the known suffering for the unknown possibility of happiness?

Solution: Embrace change. Be willing to do something different. Let go. Go into the unknown. Take different actions.

5- Give up your responsibility: Be a victim. Play the blame game making everyone else at fault or responsible for your life and how you feel. Unless you take responsibility for your current experience then you are powerless to change it.

Solution: Take full responsibility for your current reality and decide what changes you are committed to making. Give up blame.

6- Focus on everything that is wrong in your life. Whether a relationship or person. When you focus on what is wrong, you will surely find what is wrong. You will end up creating more of what is wrong to feel wrong a about. Then the negative cycle continues.

Solution: Start focusing on what you are grateful for. Remember all your blessings, and appreciate that daily. What you appreciates, expands. What you thank about comes about.

7- Denial: Lie to yourself and others. Pretend that everything is fine when you know that it isn’t. When you avoid facing what is, you end up staying stuck and repeating the same patterns of pain, and relationship. This only ends up prolonging your suffering.

Solution: Tell the truth to yourself first. Tell the truth to those in your life. Be honest. Face reality.Life is too short to waste spent suffering. Most of what you worry about today you won’t even remember a few months from now. Most of what you are trying to change in people today, you won’t care about on your deathbed. YOU hold the padlock and YOU hold the key to your freedom. You choose.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you are ready to make peace with today. Please share in the comments below. Thanks, Kute.

Thank you! As a freelancer, I am always creating my own suffering by worrying about tomorrow. (WTF, freelancing was supposed to mean freedom!) But I am working on that! Reminders like this are gold. thank you!

thanks kute. realy thanks for your helps. be sure that, im feel very better than 10 minute ago. kute i see veeery difficult an long way in front of may destination. i love my destination. becase i know what is it. but im worry about future. i dont want to be worry. i want to pass it,without suffer. and forget my past. thank you kute!!!

Thank you, Kute! I just realized for the first time…I have always been so judgemental and critical of my mother for being a victim her whole life…that I am actually also creating my own suffering and burden because of all the energy I have put there. I guess that’s me ‘worrying’ that it could happen to me, and putting up my defenses. Oh life, you are such a lesson! thank you Kute!

I always find that there is a blurry line between ‘suffering’ and accepting when something is hard (aren’t we supposed to ALSO be open to suffering so that we can learn from it?) There’s quite a few sayings about in order for there to be joy, we must also experience sorrow, and to just let that sorrow (or suffering) be, no?